They started boarding then. When his group got called, Bryce turned away from the TV and walked to the jetway. Along with the rest of the paying sheep, he filed aboard the airliner. He tried not to think about what had happened the last time he flew. Trying not to think of a green monkey after somebody talked about one would have been easier. He didn’t expect to end up in a lake again. Ending up dead… That, he worried about.
Takeoff was smooth enough. The pilot came on the intercom to say, “We’ll be using a southerly route to get to Los Angeles today. There’s no report of any unusual activity from the supervolcano caldera, but we’ll give it an extra-wide berth anyhow. We expect to arrive at LAX on time-maybe even fifteen minutes early if the headwinds cooperate. So relax and enjoy the flight.”
Bryce wondered if he’d ever enjoy a flight again. Right this minute, he would have bet against it. He had a window seat. Before long, he started seeing signs of the eruption. Despite rain and snow, gray volcanic ash still dulled broad swaths of landscape. Things wouldn’t have been very green at this season in any year. Less so now, and that got truer as they flew farther west.
Even the Rockies looked like gray ghosts of their old selves: not nearly so rocky as they should have. Up right by the eruption, where lava and ash and sludge or whatever the hell they called it lay hundreds of feet thick, they would, given enough centuries, turn into more rock. Down here, they just made a godawful mess of hundreds of thousands of square miles.
A southerly route, the pilot had said. Presumably, that took the plane well south of whatever was left of Denver. Buildings-not a lot of people, not any more. Vanessa had made it out of town before things got as bad as they could get. Bryce had heard that from Susan, who’d heard it from Colin. For quite a while, Susan had been weirded out because Bryce stayed friends with his ex’s dad. For all Bryce knew, she still was. But she’d decided it didn’t threaten her, so she didn’t worry about it out loud any more.
Bryce was glad he knew Vanessa was alive. That she’d dropped him like a live grenade wasn’t enough to wish on her the kind of end those 12,000,000-year-old rhinos on display in Lincoln had got. Marie’s disease… Bryce’s mouth twisted. Before the supervolcano, not one person in a million had ever heard of it. He knew damn well he hadn’t.
Since the eruption, though, everybody knew its name. It was on the news all the time, sometimes called HPO because no one but a medical specialist wanted to come out with hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy if he could help it. It had sickened and killed thousands in Denver and Salt Lake City and Topeka and Pocatello and Saskatoon and all the places in between.
So far as anybody knew, it was incurable. There were cries for research, for treatment. In normal times, the Feds and private foundations would have thrown money at it till it yielded up its secrets. Bryce supposed some research on it was going on. But with untold millions of refugees, with the country’s economy shot to hell, with hideous crop failures, with the prospect of years if not decades or centuries of frigid weather, even Marie’s disease had to stand in line and wait.
Flight attendants came down the aisle flogging their overpriced boxes of what was allegedly good. Bryce hadn’t bought anything in the airport, the way he usually did: he hated giving the airlines money for stuff that shouldn’t have rated a fee.
He didn’t pay them this time. Rubbery cheese on what the stewardess kept calling artisan bread (why did they grind artisans into flour?) was less than appealing. He’d be hungry when he got back to L.A., but he wouldn’t starve.
Then he said, “Urk!” The guy in the aisle seat gave him a funny look. Bryce didn’t care; Urk! was exactly what he meant. His car had been sitting in one of the satellite parking lots at LAX since he headed for Chicago before the supervolcano blew. The battery was bound to be dead by now. And, at twelve bucks a day, he’d have to come up with several hundred dollars to get it out of hock.
In a rational, reasonable world, he would have been able to talk to some parking honcho, explain how he was lucky to be alive and even luckier to be back in California, and let people know he hadn’t meant to leave his car in the lot so long. The honcho would have nodded and forgiven his fee, except for the part he would have paid had he come home on time.
The words rational and reasonable did not go along with the acronym LAX. They never had. Odds were they never would. The airport was as dedicated to separating the people who used it from their cash as the airlines were themselves. That was saying something-something filthy. Bryce resigned himself to forking over the dough.
He wouldn’t even try to take care of that today. All he wanted to do was get back to his apartment-oh, and jump on Susan once he did. The car would wait another day or two. The bill would get correspondingly bigger, but WTF.
Everything the airliner flew over now seemed to be the same shade of grayish brown-everything, for hundreds and hundreds of miles. No doubt the depth of the ash varied, but Jesus God there was a lot of it! And the sunlight that shone on it seemed weak, almost consumptive. Bryce had wondered if getting seven miles up in the air would make the light look more the way it had in pre-eruption days.
Nope. A nice thought, but no. And that made sense, when you worked it through. If the supervolcano had blasted particulate matter twenty or twenty-five miles up into the stratosphere, a mere seven wouldn’t make much difference.
When the engines’ roar changed pitch, Bryce tensed. He feared he’d be a nervous flier the rest of his days. “We’re beginning our descent into the Los Angeles metropolitan area,” the pilot announced, and he relaxed… some. “We will be landing about ten minutes ahead of schedule.”
Coming in to LAX from the east, you flew over built-up country for about fifteen minutes. At jetliner speeds, that translated into a lot of miles and a hell of a lot of metropolitan area. Bryce didn’t know of any other flying approach even remotely like it.
Lawns here were green. That jolted him with its novelty. For one thing, the ashfall in Southern California hadn’t been bad enough to kill off the grass before rain could wash the ash away. For another, they hadn’t had any freezes. From what Susan told him, the weather was colder than usual, but not that much colder.
Not yet.
The last thing an airliner did before touching down on the runway was to fly low across the 405: almost low enough to look out the window and read the cars’ license-plate numbers as they zoomed by. If they zoomed by. If the San Diego Freeway had coagulated, as it so often did, you could probably tell whether a driver’s fingerprints were whorls or loops.
A bump-not a very big one-and they were down. Bryce let out a long, slow sigh. He’d spent a lot of time wondering if he’d ever make it back. A few minutes of that had been sheer terror, wondering whether he’d stay alive longer than those few minutes. The rest was on a rather lower key, but no less sincere even so.
“Please remain seated with your seat belts securely fastened,” a flight attendant droned. “You may now use your cell phones and other approved electronic devices.”
Passengers were already doing it. Did the airlines really believe people didn’t know the ropes? Bryce didn’t think it was about controlling the occasional moron. More on the order of dotting i’s and crossing t’s. This way, if anything did go wrong, some corporate lawyer could truthfully testify it hadn’t gone wrong because the airline failed to make the proper offerings to the gods-uh, failed to deliver the appropriate warnings.
Since they were early, he made his own call to be sure Susan had got there. “Hi, sweetie!” she said. “Yeah, I’m down in baggage claim. Can’t wait to see you!”
“Boy, does that work both ways,” he answered. “We’re coming to the gate now, so it’ll only be a few more minutes.”
It took longer than that. His seat was well back of the wing. Everybody in front of him seemed to need to wrestle a carry-on the size of a well-fed Nebraska porker out of the overstrained overhead luggage bins. Airlines hadn’t intended that to happen when they started charging for checked
baggage, but it did.
At last, he escaped the plane. A stewardess’ insincere “Thank you” seemed a fitting sendoff for what got more unpleasant every time he did it. But the whole crew had worked wonders when his last flight had to go into Branch Oak Lake. Remembering how nasty air travel was these days, he also needed to remember that.
He trudged past shops and restaurants and other gates. They gave you every chance to part with your money, all right. Bryce bought a 3 Musketeers and inhaled chocolate and nougat. His steps got bouncier as soon as he did. Blood sugar was a good thing, yes indeed. Now he’d last till he could get outside of some real food.
Down the escalator. Past one baggage carousel after another, some still, others spinning, all of them made from articulated bits of armor plate as elaborate as Henry VIII’s steel suit. There was his flight number, up in glowing red above a carousel that had just started to move. There was Susan. She saw him at the same time as he spotted her. Jesus, she looked good! He hurried toward her.
Then he saw his mother standing behind Susan. Barbara Miller was easy not to notice. She was short and plain, with mouse-brown hair going gray these past few years. She had on her usual outfit: trainers (she still called them tennis shoes), track-pants, and a polyester top. She’d taken off a cotton sweater and draped it over her arm.
Bryce hugged her, too. “Hi, Mom,” he said. Then he said it again, when he saw her eyes on his mouth. Her hearing was starting to go, though she was too vain to admit it. He loved her without taking her seriously. He’d outgrown her by the time he turned sixteen. What could you do?
“Susan sent me an e-mail and asked if I wanted to come along to pick you up, so I said sure,” she told him.
“That’s great, Mom.” He lied without worrying about it. “Good to see you.”
“Good to see you,” she said after he repeated himself again. “I was so worried! Such a terrible thing!” She was inventing emotions after the fact. She couldn’t have known he was airborne while the supervolcano erupted till after it happened. Well, people did such things all the time. Then she added, “Your father would have been proud of you for being so brave.”
His father had died when he was twelve. Maybe Colin Ferguson filled some of the hole that left in his life. Maybe that was why Bryce had stayed close to him after Vanessa said bye-bye. He could worry about such things later, though, if he bothered. For now… “Brave? There wasn’t any time to be brave. We got out as fast as we could and we floated in the lake till the boats got us.”
“You’re too modest. You’re always too modest. Listen, I made a chicken last night. The prices these days! It’s robbery, I tell you! But I’ve got almost a whole bird left over. If you and Susan want to stop in when you drop me off, you could have something to eat. There’s potatoes, too, and a Black Forest cake from Ralphs.”
Bryce raised an eyebrow at Susan. She threw the ball right back to him: “Whatever you want is fine with me.”
Thanks a bunch, he thought. Should he make like a dutiful son? Or go back to his place, screw himself silly, and then sleep for about a week? He knew what he wanted to do. He also knew he’d hurt his mother’s feelings if he did it. Mom wouldn’t say anything, but she’d find plenty of other ways to rub his nose in what was going on. She always did.
With a sigh he couldn’t quite swallow, he said, “Chicken sounds good. I haven’t eaten much home cooking lately.” That had the added virtue of being true. He appealed to Susan one more time: “If it’s okay with you.”
“It’s fine. I already told you,” she said quickly. She wasn’t going to play the villain, whisking Bryce away from Barbara so she could work her carnal wiles on him. Damn! I sure wish she would, he thought as they started off toward the parking structure.
Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles still hadn’t seen Greenville and the haunting, romantic shores of Moosehead Lake. By now, Rob was as near certain as made no difference that the band never would get there. He wasn’t nearly so sure about whether they would ever get out of Guilford.
It wasn’t where he’d expected to end up, which meant as close to nothing as didn’t matter. By the time the locals finally cleared the smashed Hummer and the flipped and jackknifed eighteen-wheeler from Route 6, he and Justin and Biff and Charlie-and a lot of other people trapped by the wreck-were glad to get into Guilford. That was definitely preferable to freezing to death in the snow, the other main choice.
The longer he stayed, the odder and more interesting Guilford seemed. For a town of just over 1,500 people, it had a lot going on. The Piscataquis River ran through it. Once upon a time, every Maine town with a stream had had water-powered mills and factories. Guilford still did. No one seemed to have bothered to tell the locals water mills were hopelessly outdated. This nineteenth-century anachronism remained a going concern a lifetime after most of the others had closed down.
And there was the Trebor Mansion Inn, where the band currently resided. You took a diagonal right-not a straight right, or you’d end up somewhere else-by the Shell station near the eastern end of town, went past the slough and the high school on the other side of the street, climbed a hill, hung a left into a long driveway whose outlet you barely noticed from the street, and there you were. The Trebor, by God, Mansion Inn.
Charlie stared at it in something approaching awe when he and his bandmates got out of their SUVs. “Wow!” he said-not the usual stoner’s slurred Wow! but one that showed he really meant it. He proceeded to explain why: “If this place doesn’t have an ‘H. P. Lovecraft slept here’ plaque, somedy dropped the ball somewhere. Of course, old H.P. spent most of his time down in Providence, but he should’ve made a side trip for this.”
“No, dude.” Biff shook his head. “H. P. Lovecraft started in Chicago, but they were working out of San Francisco when they made their records.”
Confusion and argument followed. Charlie had never heard of H. P. Lovecraft the band. Biff didn’t know about the writer from whom the band took its name. Rob vaguely knew about both. Justin, by all appearance, knew neither. “How come you know about this band?” he demanded of Biff. “They’re way older than you are, and they never got big.” That was an understatement, and a healthy one, too.
“My dad got me into them, believe it or else,” Biff answered, suitably shamefaced at the admission. “He told me he lost his cherry with ‘White Ship’ on the stereo.”
“You’d remember that, all right,” Rob agreed. He didn’t think of creepy horror writers or San Francisco psychedelia when he looked at the Trebor Mansion Inn. He remembered a couple of enormous pseudo-Victorian office buildings he’d seen in the San Fernando Valley the last time the band played there. Steep roofs, funky shingles, a tower or two… Yeah, this place had the look, all right.
But there was a difference. L.A. had buildings that looked like anything and everything that had ever been under the sun. And they were all phonies, run up by modern-day real-estate guys and construction crews to make some client happy, or at least willing to spend money. Roman, Spanish, Victorian, half-timbered Tudor, the odd hot dog or donut… You name it, Socal imitated it.
Whatever the Trebor Mansion Inn was, Rob was convinced it was no imitation. It had been sitting here since sometime in the 1800s. It was older than some-all? — of the snow-covered pines around it. That steeply pitched roof was no architect’s whimsy. It helped keep snow from piling up there.
A cat gave the newcomers a once-over. It was very large and very furry: both assets in weather like this. There was a name for that breed, a name Rob was still groping for when Justin said, “That’s a Maine Coon!”
Rob thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “D’oh!” he said, as if he’d escaped from a Simpsons episode and magically acquired a third dimension. If you were in Maine and met a big, fuzzy feline, what else would it be? Rob had a bad habit of answering his own rhetorical questions, even when he didn’t ask them out loud. If you met a big, fuzzy feline around here, it was liable to be a lynx.
A man
came out of the inn. He was a generation older than the guys from Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, with a full head of graying brown hair. He wore a thick wool sweater over a shirt whose collar protected his neck from the scratchy stuff and a pair of black jeans. The sweater looked warm, but not warm enough for this weather. But Rob knew he was a wuss about cold.
“Hello, gentlemen,” the fellow said. “If one of you is about to give birth, I may be able to offer you a manger.”
A pregnant pause followed. After a couple of beats, Justin said, “Somebody at the gas station told us you might be able to put us up for a while.”
“Um, that’s what he just said, Justin,” Rob pointed out.
Justin worked it through. He looked comically astonished when he finished. “You’re right!” he exclaimed. He made as if to tug his curly forelock to the… innkeeper? “Sorry about that. I not to be stupid all the time.”
“An admirable ambition,” the older man said, fog gusting from his mouth at every word. “About as much as anyone can hope for, too, the world being what it is. I’m Dick Barber, at your service.” He stuck out his hand.
One by one, the guys in the band shook it and gave their names. Rob, who was last, added, “Put us all together and we’re Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles.”
“Are you?” The name didn’t faze Barber. “And here I thought that was a plastic band, even without an Ono.”
“Not plastic. Us,” Biff said proudly.
“When the Word was made flesh two thousand years ago, they started a religion about it. In our capitalist times, we incarnate the Sale Catalogue instead,” Barber said.
“Wow!” Charlie repeated, in the same tone he’d used when he got his first good look at the Trebor Mansion Inn. “Who would’ve thought we’d run into a dude who was crazy the right way here?”
Supervolcano :Eruption Page 32
